


endurance

by Full_Of_Grace



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Additional Warnings In Author's Note, Angst, Character Study, Demon Bela Talbot, Gen, General Unpleasantness
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-03
Updated: 2021-01-03
Packaged: 2021-03-13 02:00:32
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,255
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28520538
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Full_Of_Grace/pseuds/Full_Of_Grace
Summary: "She supposes that if kissing is something you do on purpose, her first would have been at fourteen, on that swing set, with the girl who was not a girl. That thing– black eyed and smiling, wearing the shape of a peer – it should have frightened her. Instead she had felt unimaginable joy. Here was her savior, wrapped up in a school uniform."On the brief life, and even briefer undeath, of Bela Talbot.
Comments: 8
Kudos: 9





	endurance

**Author's Note:**

> Yeah, I'm into Supernatural now, I know. I'm obsessed with Bela even though she's around for like six episodes.  
> This is very dark, so major warnings for references to canonical child sexual abuse, torture, and death.

When she was a little girl Bela had a game for herself. It was called “Endurance” and it involved holding her breath for as long as she could, till her chest burned and her vision sparked. As long as she was holding her breath, she could focus only on that, the ache that twisted from her lungs down her limbs, blocking out the other things that were happening to her body. If she couldn’t breathe, she couldn’t think, and if she couldn’t think then she wouldn’t see her fa– well. She wouldn’t have to see anything she didn’t want to. Only the dark of her ceiling. Only the feeling of drowning. 

There’s no holding your breath in Hell. The body is far more occupied in screaming. There is no endurance, because the torment never ends. She cannot shape herself into a pile on the corner of her bed and remember how to be a person. She is only a wound, stretched out on the rack to be torn open, again and again. 

That’s why, the first time the demon offers her the chance to step out of the chains and pick up the razor, she doesn’t hesitate. She doesn’t enjoy it, torturing others, but there is no better feeling than the cessation of pain. Bela lived her life by this mantra. She’s not going to stop now she’s dead.

Someone, some boy, once asked her what her first kiss was like. She must have been seventeen or so, at one of those fancy foreign boarding schools her aunt had sent her too. She was still Abbie then, bird-necked, school-slut Abbie with all her fingertips intact. 

She was perched in this dorm room, letting a grubby boy stick his hand up her skirt and call her beautiful, and he was asking her a question that she realized, with a start, she couldn’t answer. He was trying to connect with her, or maybe he’d been teasing– she can’t remember the tone of his voice. She’d said something about a boy on the playground in primary school, and he’d gone on with his excavation of her pants. 

It’d bothered her later, in her own dorm, picking at the pimples on her face. What was her first kiss? What counted as a kiss? Maybe, hopefully, it’d been her mother when she was a baby, or some other old woman, pressing a kiss to her cheek. Abbie had never been one for preschool romances, and had only started sleeping around while abroad. And the boarding school boys were rarely ones for kissing.

She supposes that if kissing is something you do on purpose, her first would have been at fourteen, on that swing set, with the girl who was not a girl. That thing– black eyed and smiling, wearing the shape of a peer – it should have frightened her. Instead she had felt unimaginable joy. Here was her savior, wrapped up in a school uniform.

Somehow it’s the dormroom conversation that crosses her mind in Hell, such a small torment in retrospect. The sulfur flavored kiss is stinging her mouth like it’s yesterday, and she looks at the demon who’d been slicing her open in it’s black and all consuming eyes.

“Oh, hello,” she says.

The girl who is not a girl, who is no longer even shaped like a girl, smiles with a dozen rows of teeth. “You remember me?”

Bela laughs through shredded vocal cords. “How could I forget?” 

Typically it takes a while for a human soul to truly transform into a demon, and even longer for said demon to be permitted topside. But as her former torturer, now Vergil-esque guide to the underworld explains; these are extraordinary times. 

The demon’s name is Hortense and she is nearly three hundred years old. She killed her husband for his money, and spent ages on the rack. She tells Bela she should be grateful that they’re living (unliving?) at the end of the world – she can get to work right away.

The first time Bela slips into a vessel's body she feels dizzy. She blinks the middle aged businessman’s eyes open and shut, open and shut. It is so strange to be moving again, truly moving, different from the drifting existence in hell. It is stranger still to be in a whole new body. The businessman screams in the back of his mind. Bela, taller and stronger than she’s ever been, looks at herself in the mirror.

“Hello,” she says, her voice rasping low and American, “let’s get to it then.”

It’s very easy to pretend to be somebody else. She’s done it her whole life – as if it was a game, really. As a child she was a princess or a ninja or an astronaut, far away from being herself in her bedroom with the curtains tightly drawn. At fourteen she was a killer. In high school a movie star, smirking and glamorous. 

And at seventeen, in the movie theatre during classic horror night, she was a monster. That ridiculous black and white vampire, all bloodlust and shadows. He wanted and wanted, and so did she. At the root of every sin is longing – avarice for wealth, gluttony for food, lust for sex, sloth for rest, pride for love, envy for anything you do not have – and she held all those desires within her. The creature on the movie screen combined them all into a consuming need for violence. She could do that too, if pressed. She’d done it before. A car crash sealed with a kiss. So next time she was at a bar and a boy had asked her name she’d given a false one without a second thought. 

“Bela.” One L- make it a man’s name and a monster’s. The boy called that name when he was fucking her in the women’s washroom, and it was a lie, and it was a good one. It was brilliant. She’d kissed him on the neck and thought ‘I am, I am, this is who I am.’ When she was sick in the toilet afterwards (as she so often was after men), she came up smiling. In the mirror, her teeth had still been very white. 

So it doesn’t give her pause to be asked her name, as she moves along the earth in a body that once belonged to an American businessman. She’s Joseph, she’s Jacob, she’s John – men’s names and monsters' names and as much hers as anybody else's. 

Bela is not entirely sure what the endgame is, outside of the end of the world. She doesn’t particularly care, or she doesn’t allow herself too. Hortense tells her what to do, having herself been instructed by various higher ups in Hell’s complex bureaucracy, and Bela does it. Just more jobs, like any of the ones she did before. Only a little less clean. 

It’s good to be back on earth, with lungs that breathe air and a stomach that digests food and a heart that pumps blood more sulfur than iron. Sometimes the world seems so pretty she’d hate to see it end. Other times, when she whispers cruel words into a person’s ear and sees how easily they twist up into violence, she understands. Such things are not sustainable. But god, she loves to sit on the balcony of a penthouse suite and watch the clouds drift by. 

She wears twenty-six bodies in her first year back on earth. They are old and young and male and female and pretty and ugly and so very human, weak inside of her grasp. If there is one thing about the job that gives her pause, it’s the invasion it necessitates. It’s unusual to be concerned about a host, Hortense chides, but Bela drowns them anyways. How long can the average person hold their breath? Not long. It only hurts for a few minutes. There, she whispers to the mewling souls as they leave her alone in their bodies, there, you endured.

Hortense says that because Bela has “experience” with the Winchester brothers, she’s been assigned a very special mission. The mission, turns out, is watching them. As a twelve year old boy skipping school, an eldery shop clerk, a lonely woman at a bar – she watches, and she reports back. It’s all very boring. For all they notice, she might not even be there. They might be clever hunters, but they’re looking for signs of violence, recurring patterns, not random strangers who look just a moment too long. 

And they don’t look back. If they had, they might have noticed the trail of bodies, (a boy, a shop clerk, a lonely woman) they’re leaving in their wakes. She learns little. Her superiors act on less. She boils in frustration, though she’d hoped she’d abandoned all such feelings on the rack. Hortense tells her that most negativity remains. 

The last game she used to play with herself, outside of endurance and changing identities, was one she called “I am not here.” It was more indulgent than most of her pretend. She was still herself, still Abbie and Bela, just some place else. Paris. The moon. A place that looked tremendously like her childhood bedroom, only the doors and windows were sealed so tight that no one could ever get in. 

She’s playing the game again now, sitting in a nowhere little bar and wearing the corpse of a mousy twenty-three year old brunette (Julie, or was it Jessie? Maybe she should read the ID again). I am not here, she thinks to herself, I am not in this bar in South Dakota, I am in Milan. I am in Milan and I am on a far more exciting mission, making deals. They’ve recognized how good I am at that, and they’ve taken me off this dull fucking beat, and I am in Milan in a movie stars body, sipping Italian wine. 

But she is not a child any more, and understands that she is still in South Dakota, with limp hair and cheap beer and the same old job. Sam and Dean leave the building, on the trail of some inconsequential monsters ravaging the county, and Bela waits a minute and a half before exiting after them, to note in which direction their Chevy takes off.

Only she must have made a mistake, let her gaze focus on them too long while lost in her daydream, because when she rounds the corner of the bar she realizes she is stuck. Someone has very quickly traced a devil’s trap into the dirt. Two someones, glaring down at her from their formidable heights. Julie/Jessie is smaller than Bela was. Is. Bela is still that size somewhere. 

“Who sent you?” Dean snaps, right to the point as ever.

“Don’t you recognize me, boys?” They can’t, of course, how could they, but it’s fun to see them wrack their brains. She needs to get a little fun out of this. She’s frightened. Something else that ought to have been left in the pit.

“Bela,” Dean says, though that should be impossible. Suddenly there’s hate in his eyes, more than the typical disdain for demons. He remembers her alright. 

“Uh, I–” quick tongue heavy in her mouth. Cold recognition gleams in both their gazes. She should have tried to lie. Too late now. Too late for lots of things.

“I see you’ve been promoted,” Sam says. “Suffering soul to demon already.”

“She already kind of was one,” Dean snorts.

“That’s it. They put me on the fast track because of all the work I already did.” They seem to legitimately believe her for a moment. She sighs. “It’s the end of the world, stupid. They’re speeding up production downstairs.”

“But what were you going to do to us?” Sam really is far too tall. Even most men would be craning their necks to look at them. Bela hates feeling tiny. She hates him. Hates this body. Hates South Dakota. Hates how the Winchesters are going to kill her for the second time.

“Would you believe I wasn’t going to do anything? I was just tailing you.” 

They glare silently.

“I’m not lying. We’re old friends, aren’t we? I was just sent to keep an eye on you. Clearly I’ve failed my mission, so you let me go, and you’ll know to watch your backs better from now on.” She is calm and collected. She is an empress and she is a monster and she is good at this. She is not Abbie and she is not Julie and she is not a body, trapped by a stupid old charm. “C’mon boys, consider it a tip from me to you.”

Dean Winchester has a knife in his hands. He’s so tall, though not like his brother. Once she’d thought she might sleep with him. It would have been awful for both of them, which was most of the appeal. In another life she might tell him she pities him, or understands him, or that she hopes it doesn’t hurt too badly when the archangel lives in his veins. In another life she might tell him about a trick she once learned.

But this is not that life. In this one she is a Bela, Bela the girl and the monster, full of hatred and her longing even at the edge of the apocalypse. The blade comes closer and closer, and she closes her eyes and thinks, child till the end, “not here, I am not here, I am not–”

And then she isn’t.


End file.
